


What is broken is broken

by Roxie Ann (pluvial_poetry)



Category: Grey's Anatomy
Genre: Community: picfor1000, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-05
Updated: 2012-01-05
Packaged: 2017-10-28 23:29:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/313359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pluvial_poetry/pseuds/Roxie%20Ann
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She can't fix it. Some things are just broken.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What is broken is broken

**Author's Note:**

> Title and story premise based on the Margaret Mitchell quote - "I was never one to patiently pick up broken fragments and glue them together again and tell myself that the mended whole was as good as new. What is broken is broken -- and I'd rather remember it as it was at its best than mend it and see the broken places as long as I lived."

  
[   
](http://pics.livejournal.com/pluvial_poetry/pic/00045hq6/)   


When Alex was a kid, his dad bought him this toy wooden plane, took him to the park. He ran around with it for hours, pretending it could really fly, and his dad told him that one day he’d take Alex on a real plane with him, that they’d go to one of his band’s gigs together. It's one of Alex’s better memories of the guy. That’s not exactly a surprise though, considering that he spent the majority of Alex's childhood addicted to smack and beating the hell out of him and his mother, when he was around at all.

Alex doesn't have many keepsakes, it's not his style. That was kind of Izzie's thing. Wedding photos, movie ticket stubs, a sweater she knitted for a dead man. Maybe she still even has the ring he gave her, the cheap plastic one he bought out of a gumball machine to make her smile. She’d mailed back her real wedding ring with the divorce papers.

So yeah, Alex kept the plane. It's on the table next to his bedroom door. Sometimes he sees it sitting there and wonders if he should burn it like Denny's sweater, finally be done with the ghost of it.

But he hasn't done it yet.

He gets back from a shift in Peds, after assisting in a rectus femoris surgery on a kid with cerebral palsy, Robbins and Torres working together to try to lengthen the muscle to get the kid to be able to walk without chronic pain and stiff knee gait. And it worked. He helped this kid to get his mobility back and he should be celebrating. But if he wants in on Robbins' pyloric stenosis surgery tomorrow he needs to rest up. His next shift starts in seven hours and he just wants to crash until then so he can study up on the Ramstedt’s procedure when he gets back to the hospital. Robbins wants him doing more procedures solo now, and he can't mess it up, not now. Not when things are finally working out for him.

The house seems empty, no one in the kitchen or living room, and he doesn’t hear anyone moving in their rooms. They may be down at Joe’s or still in surgery. So he isn’t expecting it when he walks up the stairs, and his bedroom door is open when he gets there, and April is standing in his room.

"What are you doing in here?" He asks, not that he really cares, but it seems likely that she won't leave until she tells him.

"You left your laundry downstairs, I was just going to leave it in here for you." She holds up a laundry basket filled with his t-shirts like it was an invitation and gives him that timid little smile she has when she's eager to please and afraid that it isn't working. “I don’t know how you and Jackson go for so long without clean clothes, it’s kind of disgusting actually.”

He ignores the basket and turns his back on her, as he shrugs out of his jacket. "Stay out of my room," he grunts, and hopes that she‘ll take a hint.

But it must be one of those rare days when she actually has a backbone, and Alex is just the lucky one that she finally loses her temper with, because she snaps, slamming the laundry basket down on his bed and yelling, "Look, I'm sorry I tried to be nice to you, I'm sorry I tried to like you!"

And Alex’s whole body goes numb, his mind blank. There’s still a part of him that knows that he shouldn't take it out on April, because she wasn't here back then, didn't know he even existed until a year ago. And even if she had, she couldn't have known that Izzie had said the same thing to him once. But he can't help it. He never can.

"Get out. Just get the hell out, April!" He shouts, and she startles back immediately, flinching like he actually hit her, making him feel like the worst sort of abusive asshole in the world, and of course, isn't it just some kind of twisted fate that she stumbles over and slams into the table behind her, knocking the plane that his father gave him on the floor, both of its wooden wings splintering, and breaking away from the body.

"Sorry, sorry," she gasps out, bending over to pick it, fumbling with its pieces.

"Just leave it," Alex says, and he goes to take it from her, but she holds the little toy plane tight against her chest and won't let go.

"I can fix it," she says.

He shrugs, goes to grab at it again, but she side-steps him. "It's broken," he tries again.

Her eyes are pleading with him, she's got a grip on the damn thing and he doubts he'd be able to get it away from her without peeling her fingers off of it one by one. "Just some superglue, I can fix it."

She seems to really believe that, but neither of them are thinking about the plane now. And since they aren't, if April actually believes that about him, then Alex wants to scream at her, he wants her to finally understand - She can't fix it. Some things are just broken. Because he was in love with Izzie. He married her, he wanted to have kids with her. She left and it broke him. There's no fixing it, no way to glue him back together. He's just broken, and he always will be.

But he doesn't say anything. Let her believe if she wants to. Maybe somebody should.

"I'm sorry," she says again, and she flees with the pieces of his plane.

The next day, Alex throws himself down on his bed after midnight. The plane is back on the table, by the door. It has been carefully, meticulously glued back together.

He can still see the cracks.

**Author's Note:**

> photo copyright: Emmy Vesta.


End file.
